


we aren't caught up in your love affair

by jadeddiva



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-01
Updated: 2013-12-01
Packaged: 2018-01-03 02:35:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,789
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1064723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jadeddiva/pseuds/jadeddiva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa loves fall and she doesn’t care if it’s cliché or not, pumpkin spice lattes are constantly on point at the coffee shop across the street from the library.    Coffee shop AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. one

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SecondStarOnTheLeft](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/gifts).



> For Niamh, on the event of her birthday, but it's taken me way longer to write than required.

_that kind of luxe just ain_ _’_ _t for us_

_we crave a different kind of buzz_

one.

Sansa loves fall and she doesn’t care if it’s cliché or not, pumpkin spice lattes are constantly _on point_ at the coffee shop across the street from the library.  She stops in before class, and sometimes before volunteering, and sometimes when she can’t sleep, or sometimes as a treat if she ran three miles that day (who is she kidding, that’s rarer than other occasions). 

Her roommate Jeyne says she’s got a bit of a problem but Sansa thinks that it’s a necessary evil to spend all her disposable income getting coffee because pumpkin spice is only available in fall and she doesn’t like caramel macchiatos as much as everyone else.

She doesn’t tell Jeyne that she stops by the coffee shops so often because she’s sortof stalking the cute guy who sits in near the sugars and coffee stirrers because admitting that out loud is like admitting you’re a first class creeper and waiting for the cops to come.

Sansa takes a deep breath, enjoying the pungent coffee smell that saturates the coffee shop.  She is the last a line five-deep and is legitimately worried that she will not get to partake in the pumpkin spice goodness that she maybe has a problem with.  That, and the cute boy isn’t in his usual spot.

She likes coming here because the coffee is good and the boy is cuter and he always talks to her when she gets more sugar to add to her latte (she doesn’t get whipped cream so she figures it’s okay).   He seems nice, and he has a nice voice, and he’s always got a law book on his table so she guesses that he’s a law student (no shit, Sherlock).   They don’t talk about anything much, just the usual ‘Oh, I recognize you and your daily coffee routine what is the weather like outside?’ so she doesn’t really know much about him.  But he’s not here this morning and she is more than slightly perturbed.

There is a commotion at the front of the line, and a sign goes up – “WE ARE OUT OF PUMPKIN SPICE TRY AN AMERICANO”.

The sigh that ripples through the line is ridiculous – Sansa can feel  it hit her stomach, and she sighs too.  This is the worst.  What has she possibly done to suffer this?

“No more pumpkin spice, huh?” a voice asks behind her.  Sansa turns suddenly because the voice is so familiar and – oh –Coffee Shop boy is standing behind her.   Of course.  On this day of all days.

“Yeah!” she says, inhaling sharply as she speaks.  Or squeaks. She’s not really sure, it’s happening rather fast.   She feels her face flush and she looks away, quickly, because he has really brown eyes up close and that is really distracting and she blushes so red that combined with her hair she looks like a tomato and that is not a good impression to make.  Is there a pimple on her chin? There has to be a pimple on her chin too.  Curse this Wednesday morning.

“So what do you think you’re going to get?” he asks, leaning close to her.  She can feel the warmth from his body practically burning her skin and she’s wearing a denim jacket and long sleeves underneath.  Sansa is apparently twenty going on seven, and this is how she handles talking to cute boys.

That or all the coffee is stunting her mental and emotional growth.  Obviously.

“Um,” she says, straightening herself and pretending to look at the menu.  “What do you suggest?”  She feels composed enough to look at him, and he’s looking at the menu, not at her.

“You seem to have a sweet tooth,” he points out.  “Do you need the caffeine fix or is it the flavor?”

“Flavor,” Sansa tells him.  “I like it.  They only have it in fall.”  She feels so foolish talking like this in front of him, and he doesn’t seem to mind.  He laughs, and looks at her, and her eyes move from his eyes to the way that his hair curls against his collar, and looks away.

“Have you ever tried a chai latte?” he asks.  “My sister is addicted to them – they’re spicy like pumpkin spice, but its tea.  If you want some caffeine, ask for a dirty chai and they’ll add a shot of espresso.”

Sansa nods her head, noting that it’s almost her turn to order.  “What’s your favorite?” she asks.

“They do a good job with the hand-brewed drip coffee here,” he says.  He laughs, and runs his hand through his hair.  “I’m a bit of a coffee elitist, sorry.”

“No apology needed,” she tells him.  “That’s better than me only drinking it for the novelty.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,” he responds.  He extends his hand.  “I’m Willas, and we always talk when you’re in here.”

“Sansa,” she says, taking his hand.  It’s warm but not sweaty like most of the boys she knows, and there’s something so likeable about that it distracts her from her place in line.  She orders a chai latte and steps to the side to pay the cashier.

“Do you have to go to class?” Willas asks. He doesn’t even order – the barista seems to know exactly what he wants which doesn’t surprise Sansa since he’s in here so often. 

Sansa checks her phone.  She’s got psych in forty minutes but she needs to finish her reading for beforehand.  She glances at Willas, who is looking at her steadily as they wait for her coffee.  Someone jostles him behind and he takes a shaky step forward and she notices, for the first time, that he leans heavily on a cane held in his right hand.

She hadn’t even noticed. She never noticed, all those times talking to him – not that it matters at all but she wonders if he thought she was just talking to him because of the cane?

But before she can process it further, she looks back at his face and realizes that he knows she’s noticed it.  She blushes, embarrassed that he must think the worst of her.

They call her name, and her chai latte to go is in her hands.  They call his name and he reaches for his coffee.  He does not meet her eyes, focused instead on the cup and saucer in his free hand. 

 “I’ll see you around,” Willas tells her, brushing past her without another glance.  Her stomach drops and she feels something akin – no, this is actual physical pain at how cold his voice sounds when he speaks to her.

Sansa stands there, unmoving.   She needs to read for psychology, because it’s a Wednesday and there’s probably a pop quiz, but she also wants to stay and talk to him and just...not be this person who is so awkward in the middle of a crowded coffeeshop.

“I’m sorry,” she says softly, clutching her drink close to her chest as she hurries out of the building.

He – Willas – he was right, he was so very right: the chai latte is delicious, almost too delicious when she considers what happened in the coffeeshop.  She burns her tongue on the first sip but doesn’t stop.  There’s something distracting about the sweetness and heat.


	2. two

There is only so much time one can spend fake-studying constitutional law before the words start to blur and it becomes obvious you’re hogging a table all to yourself during the lunchtime coffee rush. 

Willas sighs and packs up his books in his messenger bag, frustrated that he’s spent the two hours he usually allocates in the morning for reading and coffee reliving his humiliating morning over and over again in vivid detail.    He buses his table and leaves, heading towards the law school campus.  He walks slow so it will take him about half an hour to get there, and class isn’t for another hour still, but he doesn’t want to be alone with his thoughts and hopes someone else will be there to distract him.

Embarrassment floods his body, making him feel cold as he thinks about the look that Sansa gave him when she saw his cane.  He’s not entirely sure how to describe it, but it wasn’t anything friendly – more like his cane was a shock she didn’t know how to recover from.  He thinks that he could have been kind, but he’s spent years being very much aware of his leg and Sansa had seemed so nice that the thought of being forgiving escaped his mind.

And that makes him hate himself _so very much_.

He’s spent the past month cultivating a small relationship with a gorgeous redhead who gets the same drink (pumpkin spice latte, something that Margaery posts on Facebook about ad nauseam).  Willas doesn’t normally go for girls who have the same tastes as his sister, but there was something so cute the first time that she poured extra sugar -not artificial sweetener like his sister would have done -into her ridiculous sounding drink before looking up at him sheepishly with those incredible blue eyes.

“Don’t judge,” she said quietly, putting the lid back on her to-go cup.  Willas had shrugged meekly and noncommittally. 

“Your secret’s safe with me,” he said, which earned him a smile and a tiny wave as she hoisted her tote bag higher on her shoulder and walked out of the coffee shop.  There wasn’t a bit of makeup on her face, her hair was pulled back in a messy bun, there was a tiny pimple forming on her chin, and she was wearing an oversized tee-shirt and neon running shorts but he didn’t care, he was already smitten.

And he had been ever since.

Even now.

Even when the beautiful girl with the fine eyes looked at him like he was a soul to be pitied.

Oh god, does he have to find a new coffee shop now?

_No,_ he tells himself as he heads through campus to the law school, which occupies a few buildings in the humanities section of campus, he will stay at _his_ coffee shop.  He was there first.

He didn’t go here for undergrad but his best friend Oberyn did and it was on his way home from a party here that Oberyn crashed his car and Willas became a crippled loser who leers at young co-eds in coffee shops and then feels anger when they find him repulsive.  His decision to go here surprised his family but they took it in stride, with Margaery even insisting that he help her move into her sorority house this year. 

 It’s warm outside so Willas heads into the courtyard of the law school, not at all surprise to find his friend Tyrion soaking up the sun like the lion he claims to be.  The other man, who is both older than him and equally as dysfunctional, started in the same year as Willas and the two quickly became good friends.  Tyrion is perhaps the only person that Willas can be honest about in regards to his feelings about his leg, and Tyrion covers his feelings about his dwarfism in a thick veil of sarcasm that Willas has little difficulty seeing through.

“Don’t you usually stay at that coffee shop until the bell, Tyrell?” Tyrion asks.  “Did they burn the beans or something?”

Willas swings his bag down across his shoulders and eases into a seated position.  He leans his cane against the table.

“Burn would be right,” he says wearily.  In his head, he can picture Sansa’s look of disgust and it makes his head ache.

“Oh snap – you talked to Hot Redhead didn’t you?” Tyrion is eager at this development, probably because Willas has mentioned her far too many times in casual conversation and probably because Tyrion has yet to see her in person.

“More like she finally noticed that I’m a crippled loner,” Willas says with a flourish of his cane.  “We talked and she was so freaking mortified by the cane that she just bolted.”

“Shit...” Tyrion starts to say, but Willas shakes his head. 

“There was no scene, but my ego took a huge blow.”

“Are you sure she didn’t need to get to class?” Tyrion asks.  Willas just answers with an eye roll before Tyrion holds out his hands in a defensive posture.

“Look, devil’s advocate here – do you really think it’s because you’ve got a cane?” Tyrion looks at him steadily.  “Canes are sexy.  Doctor House made it sexy.  I mean, maybe she was just thinking of possibilities – “

“Doubt it.  That wasn’t a look of arousal I saw.”

Tyrion sighs.  “So what are you going to do?”

Willas shrugs.  “Nothing.  I like their coffee, and I was there for months before she started her pumpkin spice fixation.  There’s maybe a month until Thanksgiving and then its peppermint mochas for all the good girls and boys, so I’ve got maybe thirty days to tough it out? It’s not the end of the world.”

Tyrion checks his watch and grabs his bag.  “I’ll meet you there tomorrow.”

“You? Up before noon?”

“Shut up.  I want to see this redhead who insulted my friend’s dignity.”

“She’s not going to say hi to me,” Willas tells him.  Tyrion shrugs.

“Can’t predict the future, Tyrell.”

 

...

Willas enters the coffee shop earlier than usual since he’s got all of yesterday’s reading to do, and finds his corner delightfully empty.  He doesn’t know why but he half-expected to see Sansa waiting for him to accuse him of being a creep.  He blames his overactive imagination, and the dreams of Sansa throwing hot coffee on him for daring to think she would be interested in him, for this unrealistic expectation and is really grateful that it’s so unrealistic.

She’s a twenty-year old girl, and there are three other coffee shops on or around campus.  She can get her pumpkin spice fix somewhere else and probably will. 

Tyrion arrives at half-past nine and orders a dark roast which he drinks black.  He plays with his iPhone while Willas dives back into yesterday’s readings, soon forgetting everything going on as his mind embraces the intricacies of law.

He likes this – he likes how laws try to make sense of a world which isn’t sensible to begin with, and how there’s concepts like order and justice which clearly don’t exist in this world.  He is so lost in his thoughts that it takes Tyrion smacking him to bring him out of his studies –

-and to find Sansa looking down at him.  She holds a to-go cup in her left hand and a folded piece of paper in her right.

“You were right about the chai latte,” she says softly.  Willas glances over at Tyrion, who is clearly taking in Sansa’s ridiculously long legs in navy blue tights and a dark purple skirt that is far too short but her legs are far too long.  Willas tries to maintain eye contact.

“I’m glad to hear that,” he says, his voice sound rough and foreign in his ears. 

Sansa looks different this morning – there is makeup on her face and her eyes look puffy.  It must be allergies, with all the falling leaves.  Her hair is down and not pulled back, and she bites her lip as she holds out a piece of paper.

“For you,” she says.  He reaches forward and takes it.  When the paper leaves her hand, she backs up and leaves the shop, taking a sip of her latte on the way.

“Damn,” Tyrion remarks.  “What just happened?”

Willas looks at the note in his hand.  “I don’t know,” he says.  He opens the paper slowly. 


	3. three

Sansa walks out of the coffee shop with a feeling of utter and complete dread but she doesn’t turn back, not even once, not to see if he read the note or if he didn’t.

It was a gamble, an utter and complete gamble, and it wasn’t even her _idea_ but she just went with it because Margaery suggested it.

...

She had arrived to psychology in a dense mental fog, barely managing to not trip over the other girl that sat next to her in lecture.  Margaery and Sansa had met the prior semester and since they both were minoring in psychology, they struck up with Margaery termed an ‘academic friendship’.   Sansa wasn’t surprised that the other girl had qualifiers for friendships – she wore her Greek letters proudly and usually knew half of the people whose paths they crossed when they headed to the library to study, but Sansa liked her and she proved helpful on occasion.

“God, how hung over are you?” Margaery asked, leaning too close into Sansa’s personal space.

“I’m not drunk,” Sansa objected.  “I’m just a total waste of space.”

“Oh god, bad decisions, I’ve been there,” Margaery told her.  “Trust me boo, no amount of pumpkin spice is going to wipe that guy’s face from your brain.”

“It’s not pumpkin spice it’s a chai latte,” Sansa said. She sighed and drained the cup.  “They were out of pumpkin spice today.”

“Not a bad choice for a runner up.  So why the massive bitch face?”

Sansa sighed.  She dug into her tote bag for her notebook, and propped it up on her knees.  “There’s this guy who is also at the coffee shop I go to.  We talk sometimes.  He’s really cute, but I think he thinks I talk to him because I feel bad for him.”

“And why would you possibly feel bad for him?” Margaery asked.

“Because he walks with a cane.  I didn’t realize that until today, and he asked me to sit and talk but I have class –“

Margaery smiled.  “I think I know how to solve this dilemma.”

...

Sansa heads to her job at the library, and spends the better part of the afternoon shelving books and listening to far too much lofi indie rock.   She pushes the cart slowly down another aisle, shelving some books in Asian history, when her ring tone cuts through her earbuds and she pulls her phone out of her back pocket, answering the call from the unfamiliar number.

"Hey," a familiar voice says, low and soft and _not that angry_ (maybe the note was a good idea).  "So I read your note..."

Sansa feels hot and cold all over, listening to him.  His voice sounds so loud in her ear, louder than her own heartbeat, and she tries to figure out what to say.  "I meant what I said.  I didn't mean to -”

"Yeah, no, the note said as much." Oh god, his voice sounds really nice and she just wishes she weren't here, trapped between Mongolia and Manchuria.

She had written everything she wanted to say in the note, from apologizing for seeming like a completely rude bitch to mentioning how much she liked talking to him at the shop.  Margaery coached her through it, telling her that everything would be okay and not to worry, “guys like this kind of stuff Sansa I promise, this will totally make amends and if he offers to buy you dinner, say yes, tell me you’ll say yes”.

"So I am at work now but..." Sansa tries to keep her voice low, doesn’t know exactly how she sounds but she’s hoping that she doesn’t get shushed by a library patron, that would be the worst and so awkward…

"Oh! Sorry."  There is a long pause, and then Willas says, "Um, so I would really like to see you and apologize to you in person..."

She takes a deep breathe.  "I get off work in an hour.  Meet me in front of the library?"

"Great.  See you then, Sansa."

Sansa smiles and does a little dance in the middle of the aisle after she hangs up her phone.

She passes the next hour in a daze, meaning that she doesn't get nearly as many books shelved as she could if she wasn't nervous or over eager or...

She hasn't really thought of much past the note and how Willas would take it, but now that he wants to meet her, she doesn't know where the conversation will go or what to do and when she clocks out and grabs her bag, her palms are sweaty.

Willas is waiting for her outside, hands stuffed in the pockets of his coat.  He is leaning on his cane and when he smiles at her, she feels silly as she smiles back.  He is taller than she is, just barely, and she likes that because she’s always the tall one in the relationship and this is just…

This is nice.  She feels nice, standing here with him.  There are no other words to describe it so Sansa will pick ‘nice’ to cover it.

"No apologies," she tells him before he opens his mouth.  "We are both being ridiculous.”

"Maybe," he says.  "I'd still like to make it up to you with dinner, if you're free."

Sansa tucks her hair behind her ear.  Margaery’s words come back to her and she laughs, a short high-pitched one that sounds silly even to her ears, and Willas frowns.

“Sorry, it’s not you, it’s just – Margaery said if I was asked to dinner that I should go and I do want to go, I’d go with you even if she didn’t suggest it.”

“Wait.”  Willas is shaking his head with a small smile on his face.  “Margaery.  Sorority girl?”

Sansa narrows her eyes.  “Yeah…”

Willa laughs.  “That would be my sister.   I see that she’s matchmaking for me now.”

Sansa covers her mouth with her hands, shocked, until Willas reaches for them and moves them away, taking him in his bigger ones.   “Oh my god, I didn’t- “

“No, don’t worry, don’t even think about it, just tell me where you want to go eat and we’ll handle that later.”

She walks beside him towards the local pita place and it feels so easy, standing next to him, that she doesn’t feel awkward or silly but just feels like this is totally okay and reasonable and yeah, people have siblings that match-make and people bond over pumpkin spice lattes, and when he looks at her, she just knows that it’s okay.

It’s better than okay.

It’s really good.  Even if she gets falafel stuck in her teeth, it’s still really good.

…

She brings Margaery a chai latte the next day.  The girl takes it with a knowing smile.

“Glad to see everything worked out,” Margaery says, and Sansa smiles, taking a sip of her pumpkin spice latte.

“Yeah, I think it did,” Sansa says with a smile.

 

 

 


End file.
